Critical Review by Antonya Nelson

SOURCE: “Heaven in Oklahoma,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, July 4, 1993, p. 2.

In the following review, Nelson offers tempered assessment of Pigs in Heaven, praising Kingsolver's prose and intelligence though finding fault in the novel's “cheery” tone and unrealistic plot.

Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, Pigs in Heaven, takes up where her first novel, The Bean Trees, left off, with the abandoned Cherokee girl, Turtle, and her adopted white mother, Taylor Greer, living in Tucson. Turtle is 6 years old now, still vaguely damaged from the abuse she suffered as an infant and toddler, but getting along fine in the world.

Turtle and Taylor wind up on the Oprah Winfrey show, which is where tribal lawyer Annawake Fourkiller sees them; he decides to reclaim the obviously Cherokee Turtle for the Nation.